Email ain’t dead, says Mail.ru’s CEO. Here’s why it’s not going anywhere

Certain people will try to convince you that the age of email is coming to a close, or already has, thanks to the rise of social networks, messaging apps, and collaboration tools like Asana and Slack. But that’s baloney — if you ask a person like Dmitry Grishin.

Grishin isn’t unbiased. He’s chief executive and cofounder of Mail.ru Group, the biggest email provider in Russia, with 100 million active accounts. And he, for one, hasn’t given up on the technology at the core of his business. In fact, he’s quite bullish on email.

“It’s universal,” Grishin said in an interview while visiting VentureBeat’s San Francisco office.

Mail.ru is just one of several tech giants embracing — and trying to reinvent — email. Google recently launched Inbox, a re-imagined way of managing your Gmail on mobile. Microsoft moved to acquire mobile email startup Acompli in recent weeks. And now, Mail.ru is launching its own email app, called myMail, a mobile-only service that aims to reimagine what email means to the modern era.

MyMail isn’t just for Mail.ru account holders. As Mail.ru Group broadens its focus outside of Russia — last year it opened an office in Mountain View, Calif. — the company is supporting several email providers that people already use, like Google Mail, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail, and AOL.

Above: Mail.ru’s myMail app in action on iOS.

Image Credit: Screen shot

Grishin’s core idea is that email is still incredibly central as a means of communication. For instance, not everyone in your life uses the same social network or messaging app. That gives email obvious advantages several other services, including but certainly not limited to the VKontakte and Odnoklassniki social networks that Mail.ru Group runs.

“If I want to write something to you, I write it on email, because I’m sure you have email,” Grishin said. “I’m not sure you have a Slack account.”

With myMail, Mail.ru Group has done some interesting things. It circumvents passwords altogether. It lets users turn notifications for emails on and off for each email account that’s being used. And if Mail.ru can come across a publicly available picture of the person sending the email, it becomes associated with that person as a little avatar as emails come in, and when you start composing an email for that person.

“It’s unbelievably difficult technology when you just see picture and email of some person,” Grishin said. “This is complexity, but for users, it’s simplicity.”

And Grishin will tell you he’s not the only one who likes the myMail app. He pulled out his iPhone 6 Plus in search of evidence of the app’s popularity. He found that the app was ranked higher than Asana and Trello, among others, on the top free iPhone apps for productivity in the Apple App Store. To be fair, it had not managed to unseat Gmail or Yahoo Mail apps from the top positions in the rankings. And that’s to say nothing of major social apps like SnapChat, WeChat, and WhatsApp. But myMail was just one spot behind Google’s new Inbox app.

He opened up Apple’s standard email app and wondered aloud who would want to write an email with it when he or she could use something like myMail.

“I really believe this is cool stuff,” Grishin said of myMail.